The ground cracked under them.
The stone floor of the monastery's ruined interior, already compromised by decades of neglect and the recent Cyclone barrage, found the impact of two armored warriors colliding at full charge to be more than it could absorb in one place. Fractures spread outward from the point of contact in a ring, and the sound that the collision produced was a single sharp concussive note that briefly overrode the ongoing explosions from the bombardment still working through the outer sections.
Shockwaves rolled outward from the point of contact, visible in the cold air as compression fronts moving through the smoke.
Araghast had been built by ten millennia of war and Khorne's particular interest in his development, and it showed. The collision did not put him down. It put him back: three steps, four, his Terminator armor's feet finding purchase on the cracked stone and halting the retreat before the fifth. He was still upright when the warscythe arrived.
The blade went into the shoulder armor at a joint point, cutting through ceramite and the corrupted flesh beneath, embedding deep enough that the tip was visible at the back of the pauldron. Araghast's posture changed immediately from the specific language of someone absorbing force to the different language of someone registering pain that has found the nervous system directly.
Nolan pulled. He raised Forgebreaker.
Araghast roared.
The power sword came up in the same motion as the roar, the blade catching the warscythe's shaft at the leverage point and using the geometry of the situation to prevent the extraction: if the blade stayed where it was, Nolan's pull worked against the sword's resistance rather than against the wound, which bought time. The combi-flamer in the other hand came around at the same moment, the nozzle finding the angle that put the discharge between Forgebreaker's incoming arc and Araghast's helmet.
The flamer opened.
High-temperature stream: the kind that metal vapor does not survive, that ceramite experiences as a structural challenge. Nolan's bronze face was in the path for the fraction of a second before his decision completed, and the heat found the exposed skin at his jaw and cheek and did to it what fire does to skin when it arrives at that temperature. The damage was real and immediate and Nolan had already released the warscythe and was moving before the full register of the pain arrived.
Shadow Step.
The passage between darkness and location was instantaneous. The shadow he entered was a flame-shadow from burning debris ten meters away. The shadow he emerged from was the one cast by Araghast's own Terminator armor across the cracked floor behind the Khorne champion.
He turned to attack.
A fireball of compressed Chaos psychic energy, released in the fraction of a second while Nolan was in transition, arrived before he completed the turn. He caught it on Forgebreaker's face rather than his own, the thunder hammer head absorbing and dispersing the psychic energy with the violence of mismatched forces meeting at a point. The impact drove his arms back and used the moment of recovery.
Araghast created distance.
He stepped back, breathing audibly inside the Terminator helmet. With his free hand he reached to the warscythe still embedded in his shoulder, closed his gauntlet around the shaft, and pulled. Slowly, and with the specific expression of someone who is processing an amount of pain that would be incapacitating in a lesser body. The blade came out of the wound in stages, and the wound began to close in stages behind it.
Khorne's gifts to his favorites included this one.
He held the warscythe for a moment, then tossed it aside. He let the power sword drop point-first into the cracked floor beside it. He reached behind the Terminator armor's backplate and drew what was kept there: Lightning Claws, both of them, the crackling energy fields on the claw-tips already active when his gauntlets closed around the grips.
He rolled his neck once in the helmet.
The laugh that followed was low and unhurried, the laugh of someone who has checked their internal inventory and found it satisfactory.
Nolan watched him, Forgebreaker resting at his side, the skin on the left side of his face registering information that would require attention later.
"I have one observation," Nolan said. His voice was level. "You call yourself a Champion of Khorne. That is your stated allegiance. And yet." He indicated the direction the psychic fireball had come from with a slight movement of his head. "Khorne's position on his servants using psychic power is not ambiguous. His champions who discover this ability in their ranks generally do not discuss it. They handle it." He held Araghast's gaze through the helmet lenses. "Should I be expecting a daemon to arrive and handle it? Or has Khorne not been informed about your methods?"
Araghast was quiet for exactly one second.
"The winner takes all," he said. "Khorne counts skulls. He does not count how they were collected."
He charged.
Nolan entered Shadow Step.
What followed was not a conventional exchange of weapon against weapon across a defined space. It was a series of events in different locations: Forgebreaker arriving from one angle, connecting with the back of Araghast's Terminator armor hard enough to produce a dent that said the structural integrity was now a matter of active concern, and then the shadow it came from was empty before Araghast could redirect the Lightning Claws to face it. Then a different shadow. Then Forgebreaker from the front, center of the chest, the thunder field releasing on contact.
Araghast could track the movement after the fact. He could see where Nolan had been when each impact happened. He could not see where Nolan was until the hammer landed.
The hammer landed often.
The Terminator armor was not designed for the specific load it was receiving: repeated high-impact blows from a Primarch-wielded thunder hammer, each one delivered from an angle that Araghast's defensive posture had not been arranged for, in a sequence that did not repeat. The ceramite registered each blow as a new structural event unrelated to the previous ones, which meant it could not redistribute force across a prepared surface. Each blow found the total accumulated damage from all the previous ones.
Araghast stopped finding good angles to swing the Lightning Claws from.
Then he stopped finding any angles.
His knees hit the floor with the particular heaviness of someone whose armor has stopped being a powered system and become a container. He was still in the container. The Lightning Claws were still in his hands. He raised one of them.
Nolan stopped the Shadow Step.
He stood directly in front of Araghast, both hands on Forgebreaker's haft, and brought the hammer around in a full arc with the specific intent of resolution.
The thunder discharge released against the Terminator armor's helmet at contact.
The helmet and the head it had contained became a different distribution of materials.
Araghast, Khorne's champion and Plunderer of the Black Legion, ceased to be a tactical problem.
Nolan stood over what remained for a moment, breathing, the burned side of his face tightening in the cold air as the injury's signals continued their report. He retrieved the warscythe from where Araghast had dropped it and held both weapons at his sides.
The monastery interior was still burning.
There was more to do.
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